perfidy

GeekLethal's last post prompted a user comment from the Three Armed Man. TAM suggested that the criteria outlined by GL really point to Dork, rather than Nerd. This raises the perennial semantic dilemna, how do we define these terms? Saturday Night Live once had a sketch called, “Geek, Dweeb or Spaz?” Where contestants had to determine which category the panelists fell into. This is the question we need to answer.

The jargon file defines geek thusly:

A person who has chosen concentration rather than conformity; one who pursues skill (especially technical skill) and imagination, not mainstream social acceptance. Geeks usually have a strong case of neophilia. Most geeks are adept with computers and treat hacker as a term of respect, but not all are hackers themselves — and some who are in fact hackers normally call themselves geeks anyway, because they (quite properly) regard ‘hacker’ as a label that should be bestowed by others rather than self-assumed.

One description accurately if a little breathlessly enumerates “gamers, ravers, science fiction fans, punks, perverts, programmers, nerds, subgenii, and trekkies. These are people who did not go to their high school proms, and many would be offended by the suggestion that they should have even wanted to.”

Originally, a geek was a carnival performer who bit the heads off chickens. (In early 20th-century Scotland a ‘geek’ was an immature coley, a type of fish.) Before about 1990 usage of this term was rather negative. Earlier versions of this lexicon defined a computer geek as one who eats (computer) bugs for a living — an asocial, malodorous, pasty-faced monomaniac with all the personality of a cheese grater. This is often still the way geeks are regarded by non-geeks, but as the mainstream culture becomes more dependent on technology and technical skill mainstream attitudes have tended to shift towards grudging respect. Correspondingly, there are now ‘geek pride’ festivals (the implied reference to ‘gay pride’ is not accidental).

Nerd is defined in this way:

nerd: n.

1. [mainstream slang] Pejorative applied to anyone with an above-average IQ and few gifts at small talk and ordinary social rituals.

2. [jargon] Term of praise applied (in conscious ironic reference to sense 1) to someone who knows what's really important and interesting and doesn't care to be distracted by trivial chatter and silly status games. Compare geek.

The word itself appears to derive from the lines “And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo / And Bring Back an It-Kutch, a Preep and a Proo, / A Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker, too!” in the Dr. Seuss book If I Ran the Zoo (1950).

Sadly, the file does not have entries for spaz, dweeb or dork. But I think the time has come for a definitive taxonomy of the various subspecies. We can move toward this goal by outlining the salient characteristics of each type:

Nerd: the nerd is base type, from which all the others are derived. Nerds are bright, and lacking in social skills. They have odd interests. They are dilettantes, and usually end up consumed by counterproductive pursuits like the SCA, Star Wars collectables, and Star Trek conventions. Some nerds can achieve purpose in life translating the arcane thoughts of the geeks to the mundane normal people. Nerds are hapless, though they often have a goofy charm.

Geek: the geek is the most competent of the subspecies. Geeks transcend the limitations of the nerd through focus. Geeks have real, and often marketable skills – usually in the tech/computer fields, but in theory these skills could be in almost field. Geeks have social skills, but they are not the natural, inborn manners possessed by most people. Geeks learn to deal with others the same way they attain mastery of any other skill; by observing the humans around them, and deducing rules and patterns, and through experimentation. This sometimes leads to embarrassment when a rule is over generalized, or applied incorrectly. Geeks are often odd, but have an edgy competence about them.

Dork: the dork is the nerd’s dimmer younger brother. Dorks can’t fit in. Unlike nerds, they can’t even get laid at SCA events. Dorks are strange, but without the redeeming semi-charming goofiness of the nerd, or the skills of the geek. The dork’s attempts at humor or charm always come off as vaguely (or, let’s be honest, often extremely) creepy. Dorks are annoying.

Dweeb: the dweeb is the nerd-lite. Not so odd, not so bright, in many respects the dweeb is both a substandard nerd and a substandard normal person. Dweebs don’t fit into the everyday world, but neither are they completely at home in the clannish, ritualized worlds of the nerd. Where a nerd knows that he won’t get picked for kickball, the dweeb will keep trying. Dweebs are misfits.

Spaz: the spaz is the nerd on crack. Your everyday nerd is quiet, sedentary, and overweight. The spaz takes the basic nerd template and cranks it up to 11. The spaz is hyper, annoying and restless. The spaz is the only type more likely than the dweeb to be chosen as the spare.

Hopefully, this tentative classification scheme will be of use.

OK, this topic has been kicking around my head for a bit now. NDR and I talked about it a couple weeks ago, and considering recent blog-age at the Ministry today seems the time to post.

Unable to balance an original or imaginative format against my desire to get this up before lunch, I'll just steal...ummmmm...pay homage... to that redneck joke guy. Thus:

You know you're a nerd if:

-You see real animals and wonder about their hit dice
-You know that d100 and percentile dice are the same thing
-You are unsure of your own alignment
-You are absolutely certain of your own alignment
-You know where in your home there is a multi-sided die
-You keep that die out of nostalgia, with your old character sheets and sketches
-You wish you were half-orc
-You read your old Monster Manuals for a little light reading before bed
-TSR, GDW, and WoTC are not random letters but a way of life
-CNN and the military call it "night vision", but you know it's really infravision
-You own a sword
-Any of the above apply to you but you think you're actually pretty cool

The Ministry's roadie and loyal minion Mapgirl recently asked:

"How angry would we be if a house of worship was blown up here in the States?"

The Geek's answer? Not as much as you might hope, since relatively few of us (compared to the Islamic world) have built our identities around religious affiliation. Or at least, not upset over the fact that it was a church, but something within our own borders that was attacked.

But even when churches abroad are attacked, there's not alot of mainstream outrage about it here: 2 years ago, when Pakistani terrorists blew up and/or shot all those people in a church; more recently, when savages shot their way into the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and hid there for weeks while the IDF and Geraldo Rivera laid siege to the place and in fact, peace pricks from Europe and the US traveled there to provide widely publicized succour to the terrorists inside; and ongoing muslim destruction aimed at churches in Kosovo.

There are front pages covering the stories, but nothing like outrage over it. People don't take to the streets in droves and start burning "Palestinian" flags, or rush to their closets to get out that great effigy of al-Sadr they stayed up all night getting just so.

You'll find that media coverage of these and related events will often sympathize with the terrorist perspective, or at the very least choose language to obscure the unalterable fact that it's muslims who are on the rampage and doing the damage.

And shit I didn't even put on my tinfoil hat yet.

AP reports that the FAA has granted the first ever license to a private, manned suborbital rocket. The Federal Aviation administration granted a one-year license to Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites

"This is a big step," FAA spokesman Henry Price said.

And it is. Up til this point, no private space coprporation has ever gotten much help from the government, let alone a license for a manned spacecraft. The government has often harassed companies trying to mount private satellite launch services.

Things like this give me hope that perhaps, just maybe, it will be me rather than my grandchildren that will get an opportunity to go into space.

Spoons, no lover of George W., makes an interesting observation .

Publicola has a good post up on how the 2nd Amendment is treated in the courts, and goes into some good detail on why following precedent is not necessarily conducive to the rule of law or constitutionality. Good post, but sadly no permalinks or post titles, so you might have to scroll down - the post is from 2 April at 4:13pm.

[wik] Be sure also to read this post from the Smallest Minority, which is linked in Publicola's post.

In the comments to our earlier post about the deaths in Fallujah, Geeklethal said,

May I add that it's awfully suspect that the AP happened to be there at the right moment to record all of this.

Laughing Wolf has some more to say about that:

While I am not quite ready to call the hotel that is the home to most media-types in Baghdad the Caravelle, it is getting awfully tempting. The parallels are amazing, and extremely disconcerting. The fact is, the faces you see on the news don’t go out and search Baghdad and surrounding areas for good stories – they depend on others to tell them of the stories and don’t stray out of the hotel grounds that often. To go wandering around is dangerous, and to go where there is trouble and such is very, very dangerous. The safe thing to do, therefore, is to rely on PAO types and native bearers, I mean, native journalists/stringers to go do the searching and filming.

In far too many cases, those natives are the same helpful people that worked for Saddam and were in fact the minders and keepers of the press. They were the people who blocked them from reporting stories that Saddam did not want told, promoted the stories (remember that there is more than one meaning for this word) that he wanted told, and in general worked to block access to the truth. That such are now the main source of news for many of the Old Media speaks volumes and explains a lot of the coverage that comes out through them...

None of this is good, and most of all it is not good for the media, particularly the Old Media. The questions here are being ignored, and will be ignored as long as possible. What I see here is a mockery of journalism, and one of the reasons I am happy to no longer be associated with what passes for journalism today. What I see here is a betrayal of the principles of journalism and of the duties of a Citizen.

I want answers to my questions. I want them now. I want them in public. The media will avoid this unless they are held to the fire, and that is the duty of the New Media, and of the Citizens of the Republic and all other citizens anywhere who believe in life, liberty, and humanity. Most of all, those who are dedicated to a free press, a responsible press, must demand these answers. The reasons why should be obvious.

Read the whole thing, as it's rather devastating.

To follow up on my recent post arguing that downloading isn't what's killing the music business, I point you to this CNN article which notes that 2003 was the worst year for recorded music sales since the advent of the compact disc.

As usual, there's a stunningly ill-informed piece of disinformation in there that calls the entire thing into question.

Total sales of singles, including cassettes and vinyl, which have dipped significantly since the Internet file-sharing and CD-burning craze began in the late 1990s, fell 18.7 percent in value terms between 2002 and 2003.

What? This line, which was undoubtedly fed to some stringer by an industry flack, seems to suggest that the decline in the singles market was the result of cannibalization of single sales by downloading. Well, guess what? Labels have been phasing out the single for years, and sales are down for two reasons: there's few singles out there to buy; and consumers are out of the habit of buying singles because-- ungh!-- there's few singles out there to buy. Downloading doesn't enter into it! Now, if singles had taken a dive after 2001, when Napster broke big, there'd be something to this. But when I went into the industry in early 2000, singles were less than an afterthought already. And trust me, the labels have many better things to bitch about then limp singles sales.

If CNN can't even get its facts straight about simple matters of causality and chronology, then they're no better than Drudge, who scoops the hell out of them daily anyway.

[wik] If I have time in the next day or two, I have a couple brilliant ideas as to why the music industry is in a tailspin, and it's probably not what you think.

Here is a PhotoJournal of Chernobyl. It's rather striking, and the timing of finding it is odd -- I heard an interview on NPR a few days ago with an author who had written a history of Three Mile Island. He described the state of the containment core when the reactor was finally cracked apart, and how the investigators were shocked to discover that the interior had melted. That meant that the reactor was dramatically more dangerous than most had thought, and was close to being a disaster.

Nuclear is dangerous business. It can be managed, but the consequences of screwing it up are pretty terrifying.

As if the first effort didn't give me a full-body papercut and throw me in a deep pit of lemon juice, a group of soulless miscreants has decided that making a sequel would be a fantastic idea.

What movie, you ask? Why, it's Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation. From the Movie Web:

The Story: A small group of troopers who find themselves taking refuge in an abandoned outpost as they attempt to fight against the encroaching arachnids-not realizing that a much graver danger is actually infiltrating their unit.

But that doesn't begin to describe the horror. Notice this little tidbit:

Release Date: June 1st, 2004 (Straight To Video)

Starring a group of people you've never heard of, and directed by a special effects expert, you know this is going to be great, character-focused drama. Your hopes will be confirmed when you realize that the genius screenwriter from the first Starship Troopers has returned!

From some movie blog, guy goes to panel to listen to discussion of the abomination, I mean, movie:

Sammon kicked things off with a simple slide-show, and an outline of the movie's basic plot. The first analogy he came up with was that if Starship Troopers had been like World War II (with Gestapo like Psi-officers and a fascist, Aryan-friendly government) then ST2 is like the Korean War. The human-bug conflict has been raging for five years as the flick opens, and humanity is losing the battle - although through all-pervasive, pro-war propaganda, the majority of humanity doesn't know that.

Ross, sounds like an alegory for what's happening right now, doesn't it?

Then screenwriter Ed Neumeier shows up. I have never met the man, but I am certain that he is a sleazy, no-talent assclown. Our virgil in this hell describes the scene:

The other big question asked by Heinlein fans who still feel cheated is about power armour, and whether it'll appear in ST2. It was fairly obvious to me given the budget that it wouldn't, but Ed Neumeier confirmed that was the case... Inexplicably, Ed Neumeier blames himself for the lack of power armour in the first film, saying that it ultimately came down to a 'believable bugs or power armour' argument, and the bugs won. As he pointed out "Some people hate me for that movie," referring to some of the more extreme Heinlein fans out there (some of whom were present in the audience).

Really, why might that be? Aside from the fact that you based your first screenplay on a glance at the book cover and a cursory reading of the publisher's blurb? Jackass.

Fans of the original's sarcastic take on war propaganda will be pleased to know it's going to return for the second flick also, and that Ed Neumeier wouldn't have it any other way.

You mean someone actually was a fan of that clumsy, overreaching satire of something that wasn't even in the book? Great, we need more! Jackass.

I remember that HBO had a "Making of" special before the release of the first nightmare. In it, Veorhoven (or however you spell his retarded Dutch name) and Neumeier went on and on that their movie was an homage to the dean of sf writers. I thought ST1 was bad. It is bad. But now this collection of human trash has to go and make another movie even further removed from the original novel.

I need to go brush my teeth.